


regardless of ideology

by Kells



Series: AAUs for fun and flexibility [3]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Female Steve Rogers, On the Run, Soviet Union, Threats of Violence, US vs USSR
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-04-19 04:55:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 12,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4733495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kells/pseuds/Kells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I was so happy,” Anya whispered; her voice broke as tears threatened all over again. Her gaze flicked downwards, then back to Yasha’s face.</p><p>“I knew you would be too, Yakov, but they’ll never let us keep it.”</p><p>(1960s AAU where they both end up behind the Iron Curtain, and then cross the Iron Curtain, and Howard and Peggy do their best to bring them home.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Yakov Kolchak heaved himself wearily into his drab apartment, dropping his bulky canvas bag with an audible clank. He shook out his stiffening shoulders, already working out how many tedious debriefs he’d have to suffer through the next day before he could slip away without annoying anyone more than his handler could afford. It was absurd, he reflected with some resentment but no regret, how a shift in perspective could colour every waking moment. He’d been away from Moscow for far longer than nine weeks in the line of duty, but it had never felt like such a trial before he’d had someone to come back to.  Thus distracted, Kolchak was halfway into his dilapidated bedroom before he realized he wasn’t alone.

“Beautiful girl,” he murmured, touched beyond expression by the fact that Anya had finally seen fit to use the key he’d pressed into her hands months earlier. She wasn't quite as comfortable as he might have hoped, however, curled in on herself with her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped almost defensively around her torso. Yasha frowned as he drew close enough to make out the salt tracks on her pale cheeks, the lines of tension that hadn’t quite faded from her face even in sleep.

“Anya," he said quietly, reaching out to touch her cheek as she stirred. "What's the matter, sweetheart?" 

She threw herself at him almost before she was fully awake, sobbing and shuddering as she held onto him.

“Don't,” Yasha pleaded, as shaken by Stefaniya's uncharacteristic loss of composure as by the spectre of whatever clear and present danger had driven her to seek refuge in his empty apartment. “It’s all right. We can manage this. It's going to be fine, dearest.”

Stefaniya breathed out slowly, pulling herself together enough to raise her head and meet his worried eyes. The ring she usually kept carefully out of sight shone on her hand as her fingers curled in her husband’s shirt.

“Aleksander knows,” Yasha guessed; no one else had either the information necessary to make the connection between them or enough security in their own position to confront either of them with such an accusation. Anya nodded miserably.

“He will, at any rate. Repin will have to tell him, won’t he?”

She could tell from his face that Yasha had no idea what her doctor could possibly have to do with Lukin discovering that they had somehow found a priest- a real Orthodox patriarch of the old school- and convinced him to marry them in secret. 

“I was so happy,” Anya whispered; her voice broke as tears threatened all over again. Her gaze flicked downwards, then back to her husband’s face. “I knew you would be too, Yakov, but they’ll never-”

She pressed her whole fist to her lips, trying desperately and in vain to stifle another wave of tears. Finally, _finally_ , the penny dropped. Before he had fully processed the news Yasha had caught his wife in a shocked, joyful embrace.

“Don't.” 

He touched reverent lips to her forehead as his hands found her waist. “Anya, of course this is good news.”

She shook her head- she'd been over every way things could possibly play out within the system, and none of what she'd considered was anything at all like good news.

“They won’t allow it. Lukin can't spare a senior officer for six months- and even if he was going to let me _have_ a child they’d never let us keep it.”

When the bedpost creaked unhappily under the force of her husband’s free hand clenching, Stefaniya realized that it hadn’t struck Yasha that Lukin had quite that much say in the matter. Perhaps he hadn’t known at all- it didn’t seem like the sort of contractual detail that ended up on the recruitment posters, and for the most part only the female recruits ever had to think much about it. Anya looked away, sick to the stomach at the thought of what was supposed to follow.  

“He wants to do it next week. I let them make the appointment, but I – I’m not going.”

Her grip on Yasha’s shoulders was vise-like, a wordless plea for support- but her eyes were hard as steel. “I won’t- I can’t. I’m not going to let them take our child.”  

For a moment he just looked at her- then Yasha nodded sharply and got to his feet in a single fluid motion, taking his wife with him. He steadied her gently, pressing another tender kiss to her hair.

“Of course you’re not. Would you like to be Hungarian first, or Polish?”

He reached across her to the small table by his bed, retrieving a stack of passports Anya had never seen before. She took them when he held them out in invitation, flipping quickly through some of the most flawlessly forged documents she’d ever seen. There were four for each of them, featuring different names as well as photographs just old enough that Lukin wouldn’t think to start with those but not so out-of-date that anyone else would think to ask questions. 

“How long have you had these?”

Yasha smiled crookedly.

“How long have we been married?”

Anya had every confidence that her husband could answer that question for himself, quite possibly to the hour. Instead of answering, she caught his face in her hands and kissed him soundly.

“I love you, Yasha Kolchak.”

“Thank God for that,” he murmured, as solemn as if he meant it as a real religious sentiment. “Will you feel better if we leave now, or should we get some rest before we cut and run?”

Stefaniya breathed in deeply, feeling for the first time since her doctor's appointment like the air actually filled her lungs.

* * *

 

Three days later, the insistent jangling of Howard Stark’s personal telephone jarred the multimillionaire into reluctant wakefulness. He made a clumsy grab for the receiver, knowing full well that there was only one person who would even think of trying to get in touch with him before ten in the morning.

“What the hell is it, Carter?”

Twenty minutes later, a young SSR pilot- nowhere as skilled as Howard himself, but much more wide awake and therefore the safer option at the present moment- readied Howard’s company jet for take-off. Its owner sipped his coffee gratefully, frowning at his rippling reflection as he wondered what on Earth Peggy had discovered that was so sensitive that she couldn't even risk the mention of it on a secure line. After a long moment, he shrugged gamely. It wasn't like Agent Carter to waste anybody's time, and after all it had been longer than Howard cared to admit since he'd spent any time in Europe on anything but business. 


	2. Chapter 2

Anya Rozgova, who was really Anya Kolchak but had known since before her wedding day that she might never get the chance to use that name, sipped the strong, milky coffee that was quickly becoming her particular indulgence in the capitalist West. She bent her head over her sketchbook, working up the outline of a church she’d found particularly lovely, and tried hard not to count the minutes that had elapsed since her husband should have arrived in Vienna. As she did, she kept one eye on the American who seemed to think he was being quite subtle about the fact that he, too, was waiting for Yasha Kolchak. Possibly Yasha would say she should have shot him on sight, but so far Anya had found his attention more curious than threatening. She couldn’t quite articulate how, either, but in some odd way she had found it reassuring to know she wasn’t the only one who would notice, and presumably take action, if Lukin had found a way to detain her husband.

“There we go,” the American muttered, leaning forward eagerly enough to upset three of the four glasses at his table before Yasha was done rounding the corner. The solemn Englishwoman who never left the American’s side, though she often looked like she was wishing she could, breathed out through her nose and stopped one from rolling away to smash on the ground.

“Took your damn time, ace.”

That much was true- and Yasha continued to take his time, sauntering over as casually as if he’d been away for an hour or two instead of eight increasingly harrowing days.

“I knew you’d like Vienna,” he announced, nodding at the drawing Anya hadn’t quite finished. “It’s a beautiful city, in that bygone-days way. Have you been to any of the museums yet?”

Anya glared at him, making every effort to look stern and deadly serious.

“If you ever make me wait this long to see you again I’m going to come and find you just so I can shoot you where you stand. Is that clear?”

“You wouldn’t shoot me,” Yasha decided. His wife kept scowling, not least because it wasn’t fair that he should be quite _that_ attractive while looking so insufferably smug, but she had to admit that damaging such a face would be tantamount to iconoclasm.  

“Probably not in the head,” she conceded after a moment. “Stop babbling and kiss your wife, idiot.”

He was an obedient idiot, at least, pressing his lips to hers with a grateful fervour that belied his put-on bravado. Of course he’d been as scared as she had, on his own on the wrong side of that sometimes-uncrossable divide. Anya reclaimed Yasha’s hands as he claimed the seat across from hers, cradling them between her own. She frowned at the faint tremor she’d been too relieved to notice right away.  

“Let me guess: you haven’t had anything to eat or drink since you don’t remember when.”

Yasha looked surprised first, then faintly guilty, before his expression settled somewhere between apology and nonchalance.

“I didn’t really think about it.”

“Stupid boy,” Anya sighed; it wasn’t like she could deny that he had had more immediate matters on his mind, or that she too would have preferred to talk to as few people as possible in his position. “This is exactly why you should never be left unsupervised. Here.”

He accepted the cup she pressed into his hands, watching her over the rim as he made a show of drinking deeply. It wasn’t what he would have chosen at all- Yasha preferred his coffee black, and just shy of too hot to drink- but he still closed his eyes in a moment of pure enjoyment.

“ _That’s_  real coffee. God bless these imperialist bastards and the bourgeois traditions they cultivate.”

Anya's laughter drew the attention of a passing waiter, who returned very shortly with more coffee and a sandwich that cost more than they would have spent on a week’s bread in Moscow. Yasha offered his wife half automatically; she took it because she had found out very quickly that he was much more likely to eat himself if he thought he was keeping her company instead of doing it for his own sake. Some minutes later, satisfied that the idiot wasn’t going to collapse on her, Anya decided she was ready to ask the question that had been weighing on her mind for days.  

“He didn’t give you any trouble?”

Yasha shook his head.

“Business as usual. Well done on the last one, try harder on the next one, that kind of thing.”

“Good.”

She hadn’t been expecting to choke up the way she did. Anya couldn’t explain why she had been so on edge- she had known as well as Yasha had that they’d both be safer if he made it to his post-mission debrief. This way he had left Moscow after being put on official leave - his superiors wouldn’t think to wonder why they hadn’t heard from him unless Lukin thought to connect him with Anya’s own disappearance, and even that would only be discovered when her doctor reported her failure to attend their appointment in a day or two. Until that happened there really was no reason why anything should have gone wrong- but every day he’d been away from her Stefaniya had found herself fighting visions of all the ways her husband could have been caught or killed without her there to stop whoever tried to hurt him.

“I’m sorry,” Yasha said gravely, meaning both that he had not wanted to send her ahead and that he still thought there had been no better way. Anya shrugged; she would never have left him if she had seen any other choice that would not provoke an immediate, bloc-wide manhunt.

“It was the only way that made any kind of sense.”

It was much, much easier for Anya to believe that now that he was there, with her, safely out of reach of Lukin and Karpov and all manner of other military maniacs with no concept of mercy or justice. “Yakov, I’m so glad you made it.”

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed her fingertips just like the kind of aristocrat who would have enjoyed cultivating Vienna’s coffee-drinking traditions. Her husband would have made a very handsome imperialist bastard, Anya decided- for a moment she was completely distracted by the thought of him in one of those richly-coloured silk jackets, high-collared and heavy with embroidery. Her husband laughed softly at her dreamy-eyed expression, but didn't ask for an explanation.

“You’re feeling better,” he observed; Anya smiled both in agreement and with almost bodily relief that it was true.

“Much. I wonder if it was partly psychosomatic- I haven’t thrown up once since you got out of Budapest.”

He shook his head, halfway between happily embarrassed and gently mocking.

“You’re saying you think my physical location has a placebo effect on your susceptibility to morning sickness.”

There was a crash a few tables to their left- she’d almost, almost forgotten that they were still being watched. Yasha followed Stefaniya’s amused glance, raising an eyebrow as he took in the sight of the American, swearing and flailing his arms as though he’d been electrocuted, and his companion, who was trying in vain to both hush and steady him before he attracted even more attention.

“They’ve been travelling with me for days,” Anya told her husband- quite loudly, and in English. Her unsolicited chaperones froze with their hands almost joined over the cup of coffee the American had been inches away from emptying into his own lap. “I’m almost sure they’re hoping to speak to you at some point.”

Yasha nodded, getting to his feet so he could face the other two. As he took in the American’s features, his other eyebrow rose to join the first.

“What can  _Howard Stark_  have to say to  _me_?”

That was it exactly- as soon as Yasha said it Anya knew why she kept feeling like she knew the man, or at least his face, but in quite another context. He looked much less like the capitalist’s capitalist in person, watching her husband with a deer-in-the-headlights expression which could not have been further from the bored smirk Stephanie associated with the Stark Industries publicity stills that seemed to circulate from time to time.

“It’s a miracle,” his associate muttered, very dry. She offered Stefaniya a smile that seemed much too familiar for the first time they were making direct eye contact. “Howard Stark, completely speechless. In two minutes your husband has managed what the SSR has been trying to accomplish for twenty years.”

She took another step towards Anya, still smiling quite sweetly.

“You’re pregnant,” she breathed, face and voice alight with wonder. “Stephanie, you’re going to have a baby.”

It was all the warning Anya got before the English woman, by her own admission a member of the SSR, threw her arms around her with a gulp that could easily have been a half-swallowed sob. Stefaniya shot her husband a baffled, slightly panicked look, which he met with an equally confused half-shrug. Howard Stark looked on over Yasha’s shoulder, apparently still too stunned to speak.

“That  _is_ what ‘pregnant’ means,” Yasha told the SSR operative, moving closer in case he had to prise her off his wife by hand. “Would either of you like to tell us what in God’s name you think it has to do with you?”


	3. Chapter 3

If Howard had had any lingering doubts that the couple Kolchak were the kids he wanted them to be, they would have crumbled immediately under the weight of Captain Barnes’s steely glare. Howard himself had never been on the receiving end, but he thought Carter was handling herself as gracefully as anyone could: she backed off at once, but with a parting murmur of good wishes instead of the stammered explanations anyone else might have attempted. She was still staring openly, though, watching Stephanie like she was afraid her friend would disappear again if she took her eyes off the poor girl for a second. As much as Howard understood that impulse, he had to wonder how things had ever gone so badly wrong that _he_ was the one having to advocate self-restraint.

“Hey,” he muttered, giving his companion an affectionate shove of warning- then broke off in concern as the captain swayed unsteadily. “You okay there, ace?”

The kid was blinking quickly but a little out of sync, as though one eyelid needed oiling. Steph, who had looked up sharply when Howard spoke, seemed to share his concern. She cupped her husband’s cheek, guiding him to look her way; Howard frowned with her as they saw the unnatural dilation of his pupils. Stephanie asked her questions in Russian, but Howard was familiar enough with that particular routine to follow their conversation almost phrase for phrase. He was less prepared for Steph to turn on him and Peggy with the kind of vicious glare he had only ever known her to use on high-ranking Nazis or personal friends of Johann Schmidt.

“What did you do?”

Carter tossed her russet curls, more exasperated than defensive.

“We could hardly have- Howard!”

He’d made a grab for the captain’s arm when Bucky stumbled, but Steph got between them before he could so much as make contact.

“ _Don’t_ touch him.”

The threat in her voice was underscored by a revolver Howard hadn’t realised she had on her. He raised his hands deferentially, trying to project calm assurance even as his long-sought friend struggled to stay on his feet.

“I can help, sweetheart.”  

Carter winced; too late, Howard realised how completely Steph- and her husband- would hate that kind of familiarity from a stranger. Anya Kolchak bristled with irritation.

“What on Earth makes you think we need _your_ help?”

A streetside café in Vienna was not Howard’s first choice of venue for a conversation about Lukin’s use of drugs he was almost completely sure had been designed by Arnim Zola himself, but it turned out not to matter- Anya forgot all about her question- and possibly even that Howard was there at all- as her husband doubled over with a gasp.

“Yasha-”

He caught her hand in vice-like reassurance, but couldn’t seem to find his voice. Howard, who had been raised to pay angels about as much attention as he did fools, rushed in regardless of what anyone else might have done and pressed the kid into the nearest chair before Stephanie remembered that she still had a gun in her hand. She’d dropped all pretenses in any case, the hard lines of her stern expression from moments earlier creasing into a much more familiar one as her husband leaned gratefully into her side. ‘I’ve got you,’ Howard imagined she would have said if they had been speaking English. ‘I’m gonna look after you, Bucky, okay?’

“I can fix this,” Howard promised, unwilling to stand by and watch either of them suffer for longer than they had to. Stephanie raised her eyes, regarding Howard and Peggy with much less hostility than she had shown so far.

“You know how they did this?" 

Howard thought he did, and he had a pretty good idea of how to handle the symptoms. The captain, struggling to keep his voice even, asked quietly whether his condition could possibly be contagious.

“Yakov,” his wife groaned, obviously more concerned about his present than her future; the kid’s defence was soft and pleading, the implications of his hand at her midriff unmistakable. Howard hated himself for taking advantage when they were so vulnerable, but Stark Industries hadn’t got where it was because he’d ever been the kind of guy who would let an opportunity slip by unseized.

“We can run some tests to make sure of it,” he offered almost casually. “We can do them wherever you’ll be comfortable- I’m not asking you to come back to New York with us.”

“Yet,” Anya murmured; Howard nodded, because even if he wasn’t above manipulating Steph into letting him help her husband he couldn’t bear to lie right to her face.

“Yet,” he conceded. Bucky- or Yasha, or both- didn't look fully convinced, but he was also starting to tremble visibly.

“Look,” Howard tried again, more briskly. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know as soon as you ask, okay, but right now I’d just like to get this kid indoors before he starts hallucinating or decides one of us is HYDRA and-“

“What did you say?”

There was a different sharpness to Stephanie’s voice now- one of her hands clenched on her husband’s shoulder as the other pressed him closer.

“HYDRA.”

Carter’s voice was absolutely neutral, as if she were reading an encyclopaedia entry for the benefit of a stranger. “During the Second World War, they were-“

“Schmidt’s team,” Stephanie supplied in a whisper, stroking her husband’s hair protectively. “The ‘deep science’ unit. They wanted to overthrow the NSDAP.”

“That’s right,” Peggy nodded, much more matter-of-fact than Howard would have been in her place. “You’ve come across them in your work?”

The captain and his wife shook their heads in unison.

“Yasha gets-”

She hesitated, uncertain, but nodded when Bucky murmured something too low for the others to hear. “Nightmares. He has nightmares, but when he went to Aleksander, Lukin said it was all nonsense. Misremembered propaganda reels from when we were children, or-”

She cut herself off with a low cry of protest as Bucky thrashed against her, seized by another awful spasm. By the time it was over, Stephanie was fighting tears while husband clung to her, as close to scared as Howard had seen him in years.

“We need to get him out of here,” Howard muttered when Peggy glanced his way in question. “Unless I’m way off base this will get worse before it gets better.”

Carter nodded, then took three cautious steps towards the others so she could touch Stephanie’s arm.

“Agent Kolchak, please let us help your husband.”

In the distance, a lone churchbell sounded. When Yasha flinched at the noise, pressing his face into his wife’s jacket with a quiet moan, Anya nodded reluctantly.

“Brave girl,” Howard murmured, thinking of Abraham Erskine’s quiet approval from decades earlier- then he straightened very quickly and offered all three of the others are bright, deal-closing grin.

“Come on, then- car’s this way.” 


	4. Chapter 4

In the course of their time together in the SSR, Peggy had seen Captain Barnes in pain more times than she cared to remember- the incidents that seemed to have stayed with her were Project Rebirth itself and the first time Barnes had faced Schmidt on his own- but none of that compared to this. James was neither fully awake nor mercifully unconscious but trapped at the wretched intersection between severe nausea and crippling agony. Stephanie had started off in the chair next to the bed, but it had only taken one more truly nasty seizure to convince her that there was too much at stake to keep second guessing the SSR’s motives. She was propped up against the headboard now, rubbing her husband’s neck with one hand while the other ran a comforting path from his shoulder to his wrist and back up again. The way she bent low to murmur soothing nonsense was so jarringly familiar that Peggy found herself suddenly blinking back tears. Howard had been so sure, for so many years, but she’d never really let herself believe that it was possible until she’d seen those impossible photographs with her own eyes.

“Here,” Howard muttered, gruff in his anxiety. He set down a tall glass of water with a little less than his usual flourish. “He should drink something, if you think he can keep it down.”

When James pressed his face into his wife’s thigh with a low groan, Howard’s stilted grimace warmed into a small, apologetic smile. “Or not.”

Stephanie smiled at him, just warmly enough to make Peggy feel a brief, shameful stab of envy.

“We'll try in a minute. Thank you.”

Howard swept a grandiose bow, either because he hoped it would make her smile or because he, too, found it hard to meet Stephanie Barnes’s eyes and see only a kind of cautious gratitude where there should have been so much more.

“I need a drink,” Peggy decided. She forced a smile because the last thing they needed was for the other two to get suspicious and do a runner because she couldn’t get a handle on her own nostalgia. “And you two need some privacy so you can both get some rest.”

Howard’s eyes were sharp, too knowing for Peggy’s liking, but also sympathetic. He offered Stephanie another winning grin.

“We’ll be back in an hour or two. You can call reception if you need anything- someone will know how to find us.”

Steph shook her head with what Peggy was almost sure was mock-despair.

“Capitalist excess,” she sighed, entirely deadpan; Howard looked almost wondering for a moment before he recovered with a grin and a wink.

“That’s what I do best. See you kids soon, all right?”

“Enjoy your evening, Mr. Stark.”

Her eyes sought Peggy’s for the barest second. “Agent Carter.”

 _Peggy_ , she wanted to insist; instead, Agent Carter nodded briskly and practically dragged Howard from the room. The bartender reached for Howard’s whisky of choice with a cheery wave, and was much more successful than Stark himself at concealing his double take when Peggy downed her first double as though it had been the merest sip.

“God-damned bastards,” she hissed. “Filthy fucking Soviet swine.”

The bartender wished them a pleasant evening, parked the bottle firmly between them, and made himself scarce without a second thought or backward glance.

“Smart kid,” Howard murmured after a beat. He refilled Peggy’s shotglass before reaching for his own. "You’re not expecting me to disagree, are you?”

“Howard,” Peggy started hesitantly, not sure she wanted the answer she was about to ask for. “What exactly are we dealing with?”

He sighed deeply.

“Withdrawal, for the most part. Best I can tell without a lab, it’s one of the synthesized opiates Zola used to like so much.”

It made perfect sense, from a ruthless Stalinist sort of perspective- the captain’s mandatory medicals were scheduled often enough that he probably never even knew they had him on the drug in the first place, and his unique physiology had masked the effects enough that it hardly even affected his normal life, but a week without a hit was more than enough to leave him in the grip of some of the cruelest symptoms there were.

“Bastards,” Peggy repeated in a whisper. A terrible thought struck- one, she realized, that had already occurred to James. “Is this going to happen to her too?”

Howard shrugged helplessly- he didn’t _think_ so, based on Stephanie’s behavior so far, but he couldn’t be sure until they saw the blood samples he’d only very reluctantly been allowed to take.

“And you’re very certain we can’t just sedate him until this is over?”

Howard shook his head with regret that ran deep enough to look almost like shame- they just couldn’t risk mixing new sedatives with whatever Lukin already had the kid on.

“Nothing for it but to wait the damn thing out, I’m afraid.”

It was no more than Peggy knew already.

“I’m sorry,” she offered. “I know how much you’ve done for them already.”

“Not just me, Carter.”

He was watching her again, those dark eyes that saw too much fixed on her face. If they had been _just_ a little closer, Peggy knew she might well have-

“Mr. Stark?”

The bartender was back, looking more than a little nervous with the telephone from the receptionist’s desk in his gloved hands. “It’s for you, sir. I’m afraid I didn’t catch the-”

“On my way,” Howard cried, loud enough for Stephanie to hear him; he was gone without so much as picking up the receiver. Peggy offered the boy a single bill, enough to cover both their drinks and the fright she’d given him, and headed back upstairs. She found James curled up in the kind of foetal position that spoke of pure, helpless agony; his wife was doing her always admirable best to calm and distract him while Howard checked his vitals with uncharacteristically gentle hands.

“You’ll look after her.”

The words were slurred and indistinct, but from the wide-eyed look on Howard’s face Peggy was fairly certain she had understood.

“What’s that, ace?”

“You’ll take her with you- you won’t let him-”

“Stop,” Stephanie hissed. She caught James by the shoulders when he twisted to meet her eyes, guiding him to turn less haphazardly so he could face her without doing himself any further damage. “Stop, just stop. Do you think I can't tell what you’re trying to do?”

Some of the tension in the captain’s shoulders seemed to leech away as James smiled.

“I love you, Anya moya.” His eyes slid lower, including their child in the conversation. “Both of-”

Howard swore under his breath as James choked, back arching as his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. Peggy surged forward as if to help, but it was over as quickly as it had begun.

“No,” Stephanie rasped, already pressing nervous fingers to her husband’s pulse point. James was completely motionless in her frantic grip, limp as a wet rag and only a shade or two less pale. Peggy wasn’t at all sure he was breathing.

“No, no, Yakov-”

If there had ever been a less convenient moment for an unknown shooter to choose to open fire on a hotel room anywhere in the world, Agent Carter was sure she couldn’t have named it for all the tea in China.


	5. Chapter 5

Howard was still fumbling for Bucky’s pulse when Stephanie grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him to his knees. Seconds later, another volley of bullets shattered the last intact windowpane in the room.

“Damn,” Howard muttered, reflexively moving to dust the debris from his jacket. Stephanie rolled her eyes, impatient and disdainful, but dipped her head to indicate her still-unconscious husband.

“Stay with him,” she ordered, waiting for Howard to nod before she turned to Peggy. Agent Carter was crouched below the broken window, sizing up her opponent with grim curiosity. “How many?” 

“Just the one. I’ve almost got him-”

Peggy took the shot; both women winced.

“That’s not going to do it,” Stephanie decided, glaring at the other woman’s handgun like it had insulted her mother. “Cover me."

Somehow, in the bare minute Howard had been distracted by Peggy’s marksmanship, Steph had managed to retrieve and load a rifle she’d been keeping god alone knew where.

“How on Earth-“

“Quiet,” both women snapped. With his only available source of support out for the count on the bed, Howard decided it would be best to comply for the moment. He’d never seen Steph in action himself, beyond that first display in Brooklyn and a series of staged trials, but of course both Peggy and Bucky had talked his ear off whenever the opportunity arose. It wasn’t that he’d ever doubted them, exactly, but it was one thing to nod agreeably while a doll-dizzy kid half-drunk on his own wife murmured exultant praises into a glass of whisky that was completely wasted on him thanks to Erskine’s bloody serum. It was another thing entirely to watch the young woman, lithe and lovely as a dancer, not to mention three months pregnant, line up her shot and take down an active shooter in a single flawless attempt.

“There,” she murmured, petting the rifle Howard hadn’t really got his head around yet with satisfaction. That was new, he was almost sure: the Stephanie they’d known before had never been quite so at peace with the necessary violence of war.

“Nicely done."

Peggy hesitated for a moment, but Howard had never known Agent Carter to avoid a difficult question if she thought the answer was important. “No one you knew, I hope.”

Stephanie gave a sharp, sarcastic chuckle that sounded nothing like the girl Howard remembered.

“That wasn’t one of _our_ people.”

“You seem sure,” Howard observed; Stephanie stared at him like he’d announced with some surprise that the ceiling was higher off the ground than the floor.

“He came here to kill you,” she said slowly. “And now he’s dead, and you’re not. Of course he wasn’t one of ours.”

“Point well made,” Howard conceded after a second; Stephanie inclined her head graciously. She had crossed the room as she spoke, moving to rest one hand on her husband’s shoulder as the other eased his eyelids apart so she could check on his still-dilated pupils.

“Yasha,” she sighed, almost reproachful. The kid was as still and pale as when they’d come in, but Howard had kept one hand at Bucky’s wrist throughout the whole exchange, just in case, so he felt comfortable vouching for his friend’s longevity.

“He’s all right,” he offered; Stephanie looked genuinely amused for a second.

“And your people say the KGB has low standards.”

She kissed her husband’s brow like it was just part of the routine medical run-through, then turned back to Howard expectantly. “How would you like to proceed?”

Howard blinked- the last thing he had expected was to be given any say in what happened next.

“Pardon?”

“You’re the one they’re trying to kill,” Stephanie shrugged. “Yakov is more familiar with your organisation than I am, but I assume you have some kind of protocol for avoiding the police.”

The other two exchanged a sceptical look- for the most part, the SSR’s 'normal' procedure was whatever the CIA let Howard get away with, tempered by Peggy’s conscience and such pesky physical constraints as gravity and actual velocity.

“Right,” Peggy nodded when Howard opened and closed his mouth without saying anything. “Well. I’d really like to get out of here with as little to-do as possible.”

“Agreed,” Stephanie murmured. “If only we could move this one with any kind of subtlety.”

For a moment, they all stared at the young man stretched out insensible between them.

“I have an idea,” Howard announced; he still couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from Steph’s pale fingers half-buried in her husband’s dark hair. “I’m almost sure it’ll work, too.”

Peggy, apparently, could tell from his voice that the other shoe had yet to drop.

“But?”

Howard smiled ruefully.

“ _But_ I have the strongest feeling Mrs. Captain Kolchak isn’t going to like any part of it.”

Stephanie bristled, immediately defensive.

 “If your plan gets us out of this hotel without running into either the police or the press then I assure you I'll like it well enough.”

A rapidly approaching siren underscored the urgency of their situation. Howard sighed, shrugging off his jacket with a ‘don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you’ kind of look.

”I’m going to remind you that you said that, all right?”

* * *

 

“You were right,” Stephanie hissed some fifteen minutes later. The words were a little garbled behind the over-large surgical mask Peggy had produced from her apparently bottomless stash of unexpected supplies. “I hate every part of this.”

“I’m usually right,” Howard assured her, grinning behind his own mask before he let his voice drop. “Don’t worry, okay? No one’s getting anywhere near the kid.”

They weren’t even trying all that hard: it was hard to say whether hotel management or the local police were more genuinely horrified by the fact that the world-famous Howard Stark had apparently been shot to death on their watch. His personal doctor had already signed the death certificate, though, and between the steely-eyed nurse with her white-knuckled grip on the trolley and the near-hysterical Ms Carter it had been very quickly agreed that the best thing for it was to provide a hasty, discreet escort to the airport and work on tracking down the two rival shooters who had apparently been competing for their bounty until Stark’s estate got in touch from New York. They only had one little hiccup, when Bucky started to wake during the ride and Peggy had to stage a near-total breakdown to disguise his thrashing as her own.

“I’m very sorry about all this,” she told Stephanie at last, wasting no time at all in whipping the morbid canvas sheeting out of the way as soon as the doors were shut behind them. The young man Peggy had sent to fetch Howard was on duty again, so Howard himself had the rare opportunity to host his guests from the cabin itself.

“I did tell you it would work,” he offered, not quite apologetically. Stephanie scowled. They helped her to lay her husband out across the seats, but even with his head in her lap and his fingers curling in her skirt she seemed to be having trouble shaking the image of her husband as a corpse.

“I never want to do that again.”

Bucky gave a discontented kind of murmur, apparently responding to the distress in her voice. Stephanie smiled like she couldn’t help it, bending low to kiss his still-pale face.

“Quiet,” she ordered in Russian. “You’re safe with me, all right?”

He seemed to nod against her thigh, subsiding with a grateful sigh as her fingers found the still-tight tendons in his neck.

“My poor dearest idiot,” she muttered, mostly to herself; Howard hid his grin a microsecond before she would have caught him beaming at the pair of them like a complete sap.

“Thank you,” she offered when their eyes met. He thought she might say more, but she just tilted her head at him curiously. “You have a question, I think.”

“So many,” he answered honestly. Stephanie’s lips twitched.

“Start with the first one."

This time, Howard let himself grin at her outright.

“You got it, sweetheart.”

He made no effort to acknowledge Peggy’s elbow digging hard into his side.

“First question: how did you two end up together, and does the Kremlin know?”


	6. Chapter 6

Anya was still carding her husband’s hair with uneasy fingers, doing her best to breathe in time with him because every reminder that he was in fact still breathing helped to stave off the deluge of tears she wouldn’t let fall until Yasha was safe.

“Are you asking when we met or how he convinced me to marry him?”

For the first time, Anya realized how strange it was that she had never told anyone either story before.

“Either,” Howard Stark shrugged good-naturedly. He had very compelling eyes, keen as a raptor’s but also warm, and with a melancholy depth that felt strangely familiar. “Or both, if you feel so inclined. We’ve got time.”

“It’s not _that_ long a story.”

It seemed so long ago, a whole lifetime in so many ways- and yet Anya had very little trouble recalling the smallest inconsequentialities in vivid detail. She had been hovering between boredom and deep discomfort in an army bar that was dire even by Moscow’s low standards, fervently wishing that Lukin had chosen any other meeting-place in the Kremlin. Anya hadn’t lived in the capital as long as she had without learning to ignore the comments she _probably_ wasn’t meant to overhear, which ranged from speculation on whether she charged by the hour or overnight to which general would claim the right to marry her before the year was up, but she still found herself fingering her pistol more often than the bureau would have appreciated.

“Comrade Rozgova?”

She turned to find three young men studying her speculatively.

“What is it?”

The one who had spoken first answered for the group again.

“General Lukin won’t be able to make it after all,” he told her in a much less official tone than Anya thought Lukin had intended him to use. “He’d like to meet you in his office tomorrow- will 1100h suit?”

Anya scowled, but even Aleksander Lukin couldn’t always march to his own beat.

“Fine.”

She turned on her heel, almost physically yearning for the crisp outside air, but found herself slowed by an unsolicited hand suddenly wrapped around her forearm. “Was there something else?”

“Don’t be like that,” the bold one cajoled. “It doesn’t have to be a wasted night, kitten.”

Stephanie raised an eyebrow as she wrenched her arm free.

“I think that ship has sailed, Comrade.”

They were starting to close in on her by then. The other two had yet to speak, but Anya found she didn’t like their expressions. Anya backed away only to find herself pressed up against the bar.

“I’m leaving,” she told the teenagers evenly, prepared to push past them if they wouldn’t budge. She was fairly sure that she could take them on if she had to, but she didn’t like to wonder what she would do if it turned out that a whole score of their classmates were on hand to take their side. The ringleader made another grab for her, this time aiming for her waist. Anya glared. “Alone, I didn’t think I had to clarify.”

The leering cadet laughed.

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t you?”

The newcomer was older, tall and dark-haired with sharp, assessing eyes and an expression of pure irritation. “I thought she was quite clear on that point, myself.”

Anya was intrigued to see all three of her would-be attackers pale, exchanging a panicked glance as they stiffened to attention as one. This time it wasn’t the boy who had been so bold with her who answered, but the taller of his two now very nervous friends.

“Captain Kolchak! We were- that is, General Lukin asked us to-”

Their- captain, apparently- raised an eyebrow at Anya instead of paying them any attention.

“Did they give you his message?”

“After a fashion.”

“Did you want to reply?”

Anya shrugged.

“He was just rescheduling an appointment.”

Kolchak nodded, expression turning severe again as he addressed his inferiors.

“Was there anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“Fine,” he almost growled. “Get the hell out of here, then.”

They fled in terror. Anya braced herself for smug satisfaction when the captain turned to meet her eyes again, but found him watching her with something very like real sorrow in his brilliant eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said, utterly sincere. “That was disgusting.”

“That was nothing,” Anya shot back, wondering where on earth Kolchak spent his time if he thought that was the worst Anya had to deal with in a room full of drunken military men. “I could have handled them.” 

“No doubt,” the soldier agreed without a trace of irony. “God knows they’d have deserved it, too.”

His expression grew wry. “But I’m the one who has to run their drills tomorrow evening, and therefore the one who would have to explain to General Lukin that I had to reschedule our regular appointment because a couple of jackasses needed twice as long as usual because they were all black and blue.”

He chose not to point out that he was the superior officer in their present situation, and that if he had stepped in _after_ Anya had thrown the first punch it would have had to be her name on record for causing the altercation. He really was very handsome, she thought unexpectedly- then wrenched her eyes away from the captain’s face because she had never been one of _those_ women and had no desire to change that.

“I suppose that’s fair,” Anya allowed grudgingly, tracing a crack in the wooden bar-top with one fingernail to keep her eyes and hands busy. It wasn’t enough- she felt much too conscious of Kolchak studying her profile as she tried not to engage without actually brushing him off.

“Are you going to be offended if I get you a drink?”

Anya whipped round at that, but the soldier looked curious rather than accusing, and there was nothing at all mocking in his face or voice. Anya fixed him with a challenging look.

“Are you going to expect me to sleep with you if I accept it?”

If she was honest with herself, she had expected the kind of appreciative leer which would have told her that the captain’s chivalric bent was just another superficial mask. Instead, Kolchak flushed with unfeigned outrage, jerking out of his relaxed, lounging stance to adopt a much more military posture.

“If that’s what you think of me I’ll get out of your way sooner rather than later.”

There was something in his voice that Anya recognized without being able to name it or explain it. “Have a good night, all right?”

Hardly able to explain her actions even to herself, she reached out to grab the captain’s forearm, unconsciously mirroring the way she herself had been detained earlier.

“Don’t- I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

His eyes were on her fingers, pale against his dark wool coat. Anya let go almost reluctantly, suddenly shamefaced. “I was just-”

“Checking?”

“Teasing.”

He met her eyes then, surprised to the point of a strange, almost fragile vulnerability that made Anya want to wrap him in a warm blanket, or possibly a passionate embrace. She shook her head, trying to clear it, and made an effort to smile with causal camaraderie.

“Let me get our drinks, how about that?”

The handsome captain smiled at last.

“Why do I feel like we need to discuss terms first?”

Anya found herself laughing, a real spontaneous chuckle of unrehearsed amusement.

“I only have one demand,” she decided. “Next time I’d like to deal with your jackasses my way.”

“There had better not be a next time,” Kolchak grumbled, but extended his hand to shake on it. “Make mine a double.”

Two almost shockingly enjoyable hours later, they parted company on the street corner outside.

“Comrade Kolchak,” Anya found herself calling a second before it would have been too late. The captain turned his head, but chose not to come back towards her. “I haven’t said thank you.”

The captain smiled.

“I suppose you haven’t. Good night, Comrade Rozgova.”

He was gone before Anya could decide whether to laugh or throw something at him.

She was jarred from the recollection by Howard Stark’s bright, appreciative laughter. Carter looked less comfortable, Anya thought, but that seemed to be true most of the time.

“Just like that,” the American grinned. “Inseparable ever since, huh?”

“If only,” Yasha murmured, just about audible. Anya froze, almost alarmed to find him awake at last. He was still in so much pain, she saw unhappily, but his eyes were clear and calm. “Where are we going?”

Anya tugged on his hair playfully.

“Guess.”

Yasha directed his wry look at Stark.

“You don’t waste time, do you?”

The American smiled. It was gentler, Anya had noticed before, when he was looking at her husband.

“Not if I can help it, ace.”

Yasha was smiling, amused and affectionate, but his jaw was already locking under Anya’s caressing hand.

“Yakov,” she murmured, but hadn’t even formulated the question before his eyes squeezed shut in frustration mixed with pain.  

“Sorry,” he rasped. “Anya, I’m-“

“Hush.”

She let one hand linger at his jaw while the other smoothed his hair back, nails scraping over his scalp to draw a ragged gasp past his chapped lips. “I told you growing up in Siberia made your brain soft. How can any of this be your fault, idiot?”

He raised a shaking hand to encircle her wrist.

“Should be looking after you. Especially now.”

“Nonsense,” Anya protested, glowering as sharply as she could with his head still in her lap. “You’d never have married me if you were looking for a princess in a tower.”

Yasha had to smile at that, but it was pained and unnerved in a way that made Anya’s hands itch for her rifle.

“It will pass, Yakov.”

Only moments later she was holding him steady, rubbing his back as he heaved and retched.

“Listen," her husband pleaded, pale and scared in a way she’d never seen before. “Anya, you know I-”

She crushed him to her, desperate to offer comfort but entirely unwilling to let him say goodbye.

“I know,” she promised, kissing his clammy cheeks and trying not to wonder how much more of this his already racing heart could take. “I love you, Yasha mine.”

He let his head fall against her shoulder, still wracked by the involuntary tremors Stark seemed to think were just another symptom of the condition he had yet to fully explain. Anya pressed her soldier closer still, trembling herself by then, but looked up when Stark took the seat across from her with a huge leather-bound book in his hands. She couldn’t keep the incredulity out of her voice.

“Is that _War and Peace_?”

The American nodded sheepishly.

“I don’t have a lot of books in Russian, I’m afraid. I thought, maybe-“

His eyes slid sideways as his expression changed. “My father used to read to my mother, sometimes. To distract her, I guess I thought, when it all got too much.”

Anya found herself suddenly blinking back tears, overwhelmed by Stark’s consistent, unsolicited generosity as much as the terrifying awareness that she had no idea whether her husband would even be alive if not for Stark’s intervention. It was very close to what Lukin would have recommended, she thought: it wouldn't have been especially difficult to have his coffee spiked, or some such thing, and as Yasha had said they'd wasted very little time in taking complete control of the situation as soon as he was too vulnerable to resist. 

“Thank you,” she whispered, but the hand that wasn’t still steadying her husband was already wrapped around the handgun that hadn’t left her pocket yet. “Just to be clear, I think I should ask: are we your prisoners here?”


	7. Chapter 7

“How can you have to ask that?”

Peggy lurched to her feet, heedless of the swaying of the aircraft. That her voice was thickening with tears only made her more resentful. “After everything we’ve-“

Her voice wavered when Stephanie shifted in her seat, angling her shoulders to keep as much distance as possible between her only-somewhat-conscious husband and the SSR agent suddenly looming over them.

“Stay back.”

She spoke with the same cool detachment with which she had corrected Howard about the assassin she’d taken down in a single shot, but it was the desperation in her eyes rather than the gun in her hand that moved Peggy to collapse back into her seat without protest. Stephanie inclined her head in not-quite-grudging acknowledgement, maintaining her careful grip on both her husband and her pistol.

“He was fine,” she said plainly. “Then you two got involved, and not a full day later he’s so sick he can’t see straight, I’ve fired a gun Lukin’s people know is mine from a hotel room I assume everyone’s about to know was Howard Stark’s-”

“You did what?”

James raised his head with an effort. “You might have mentioned that.”

“Hush,” Stephanie chided, sliding her hand up his neck to guide him back to rest against her shoulder. “Nothing happened that won’t keep until you can stay upright on your own. This is my operation, all right?”

James tried to laugh and choked instead; his wife steadied him with a sympathetic hiss.

“Yakov-“

“I’m fine,” the captain murmured groggily. Stephanie rolled her eyes at him.

“You’re delusional, you mean.”

The brusqueness of her tone was entirely at odds with the gentle hand sweeping his sweaty hair out of his eyes. “How bad is it?”

Her husband raised a still-trembling hand to her cheek and kissed her with the same brazen tenderness that had consistently turned heads during the war.

“Stop,” Stephanie protested, wrenching away with a gasp that sounded like it hurt. She had let go of her gun, at least- her grip on the captain’s shoulder was as frantic as her voice. “Yasha, for god’s sake stop trying to say goodbye.”

James was wide-eyed as her voice broke on ‘goodbye.’

“I wasn’t.” He slipped out of his seat with surprising grace considering he’d been barely mobile only hours earlier and put his arms around his wife as she rose with him as though compelled. “Dearest, that’s not what I meant at all.”

Stephanie hung onto her husband as if their lives depended on it.

“Idiot,” she grumbled rebelliously, tugging on his hair until he dropped his head enough to touch his forehead to hers. “My god, Yasha, do you know how worried I’ve been?”

The look in his eyes said he did, as well.

“I’m-“

“Don’t you _dare_ apologise again.”

Instead of trying it, James kissed his wife again; that touch, at least, seemed as swift and sure as ever.

“I’m fine, I was going to say.”  

One of her hands came up to frame his face; suddenly, the look in Stephanie’s eyes was much closer to something Peggy might comfortably have called familiar.

“For one of Lukin’s favourites you’re a terrible liar, Yasha Kolchak.”

The captain’s answering smile was distinctly coy.

“I’ve always suspected you quite like that.”

It made Steph smile, but wasn’t quite enough to distract her from the strain already showing on his face.

“Here,” she murmured, taking the window seat this time so James could stretch out with his head in her lap. Howard, who had already been quiet longer than Peggy had seen him manage in years, produced a blanket seemingly out of nowhere; the captain raised a curious eyebrow, but gave a weary nod of thanks instead of commenting. “Promise you’ll say if it gets worse.”

He nodded obediently; Stephanie caught one of his hands and twined their fingers together, apparently steadying both of them at once.

“Good boy. Now.”  

Suddenly, she was speaking English again. “I’m still hoping for an answer.”

It was like flipping a switch- by the time she raised her eyes to meet Peggy’s, there was no trace at all of the warmth that had so recently suffused her expression.

“We’re halfway to America,” Stephanie offered by way of completing the thought she had begun before James had distracted her. “Effectively in your custody, with no idea of what to expect on the other side except that we can’t go back however much we hate it. How can I _not_ ask how much of that was by design?”

Phrased that way, Peggy had to admit the SSR looked fairly sinister.

“You’re giving us far too much credit,” she protested. “All we wanted was to talk to you. We had no idea about the rest of it.”

Stephanie turned considering eyes on Howard.

“She had no idea, maybe. You were almost as anxious as I was in Vienna.”

He hesitated, glancing at Peggy as if to check that he was allowed to go on, then swallowed hard before he told her the truth.

“I wasn’t altogether sure he was gonna make it. As far as we know none of your boss’s inner circle has ever made it as far as Budapest before.”

“That can’t be right.”

She was white to the lips already. “You’re wrong, that’s not-”

She unclenched her hand deliberately, afraid to hurt her husband, and they saw the penny drop as the persistent tremour that was still troubling him registered in a new light. “This started before the rest of it. In that café- you said you hadn’t eaten.”

James nodded slowly, a little at a loss.

“It wasn’t anything like _this._ I just thought I must have been more tired than I realised.”

Howard nodded.

“It starts out like the flu, best we can tell- then it knocks you right out just as they catch up so you can’t fight back when they’re ready to take you in.”

It would have kicked in much faster without the intervention of the serum, he wouldn’t tell them until they were more ready to deal with that, and it was painfully unlikely that anyone travelling alone would have the slightest chance of resisting once the full effect caught up with them.

“No,” Stephanie protested, her own hand trembling slightly as she stroked her husband’s pallid cheek. “No, that’s- that’s-”

Her husband turned his face to kiss her palm.

“Entirely plausible, given what we know about Aleksander Lukin?”

She couldn’t seem to find a reason to disagree.

“Poor Yasha,” she whispered, back to carding his hair with careful fingers. “What in god’s name did you ever do to anyone?”

He smiled a little.

“You mean before I stole Lukin’s best asset and ran away to America with her?”

She had to smile at that.

“You think _you_ stole _me_? I’m not the one who was unconscious when we left Europe, Yakov.”

He blinked up at her, thinking it over, then shut his eyes with an agreeable kind of shrug.

“Before I was stolen by Lukin’s best asset and ran away to America with her, then.”

His wife ran her fingers through his hair, appeased.

“You’re no one’s prisoners,” Peggy insisted as the silence stretched. “If you find that New York’s not to your taste you only have to tell us where you’d rather be.”

She met Stephanie’s eyes as calmly as she knew how, working to keep all signs of strain out of her voice.

“We’re not asking you to trade for it, either. I know this is hard to believe, all right, but all we want is to help you.”

Stephanie watched her intently, less accusing now but still assessing.

“Why?”

Somehow, Peggy hadn’t thought to prepare for that question.

“What?”

The girl who had once been her dearest friend didn’t so much as smile.

“If it’s not information you want, why do your people care so much what happens to us?”

Howard was sitting up straighter now- Peggy realized too late that she didn’t like the glint in his eyes at all.

“I’m almost sure the man you killed was HYDRA,” he told the other two before so much as giving his own bloody partner any kind of warning. “Or ex-HYDRA, I suppose.”

Peggy had no idea, at all, whether that was true at all- but it seemed to do the trick: Stephanie looked intrigued.

“What do Nazi scientists want with you?”

Howard smiled, rueful and sincere.

“I found something they were looking for,” he said simply. “And they know I’m not really very good at sharing my new toys, as it were.”

James gave a rasping wheeze which would, presumably, have been laughter if he’d been able to hold his head up properly.

“There you are,” he murmured when he could, fairly smirking at his wife. “If the other side is worse than Hitler I _think_ we can assume these are the good guys.”

“You would think,” his wife murmured darkly, but Peggy thought she looked more at ease than she had at any point since her husband had collapsed.


	8. Chapter 8

Howard gave his young friends as much detail as he had, and some that he didn’t have- more than once, he caught Peggy raising a skeptical eyebrow as he walked the line between considered theory and wild speculation. It seemed to do the trick, at any rate- for the first time in hours, Bucky was alert and absorbed as he followed Howard’s rambling conjecture with measured curiosity.

“You really think they have-”

His head snapped sideways as his wife breathed in sharply, the hand that wasn’t still in his flying to her hip. “What’s wrong? What is it?”

Steph squeezed his hand, breathing out slowly through her nose.

“Nothing- it was only a cramp.”

Bucky had already turned to face her; watching him watch her eyes, Howard wondered at how much and how little had changed since before he’d set up that first meeting with Abraham Erskine.

“What kind of cramp? Has this happened before? How bad was it?”

Steph gave the dry chuckle Howard was starting to think of as her Russian laugh.  

“You’re such a hypocrite about these things.”

Her husband glared even as he kissed her forehead.

“I’m not carrying a child, am I?”

“You have to give him that,” Peggy murmured unexpectedly, visibly biting back a smile as she watched them bicker. “It’s to be expected- it happened when you stretched?”

Steph nodded.  

“Sounds like round ligament pain. I'm afraid it’s likely to get worse before it gets better, but it’s perfectly normal.”

Stephanie rested her cheek against her husband's shoulder.

“You see? Relax, Yasha.”

“Like you’ve been relaxed, you mean.”

“You’ve been so sick,” Stephanie protested, eyes closing like she was trying to shut out the image of that hotel room fit. “You were _unconscious_ , you hopeless-”

Bucky lifted her chin, ever so gently, and cut her off with a kiss as quick as it was tender.

“I love you. I’m sorry I frightened you. I promise I feel better now.”

That much was obviously true, though in their old life Howard would definitely have given the kid as hard a time as he ever had about setting the bar a _little_ higher in future. Stephanie nodded reluctantly, watching their joined hands as if daring his to shake.    

“All right.”

She closed her eyes as he slipped his arm around her, tucking her close again. “You’re still an idiot, though.”

Her husband kissed her hair with the air of a man who’d long since learnt his place in the natural order.

“Obviously.”

Howard choked on his delighted laughter too late to stifle it completely. They turned as one, but when both seemed curious rather than annoyed he decided it was safe to risk another prying question.   

“So how long did it take you to ask this girl to dance?”

The poor kid looked so utterly bemused that Howard had to laugh. “What- do kids these days not take their best gals dancing?”

Peggy’s expression was deeply unimpressed.

“Not while they work for the KGB, I wouldn’t think.”

“Not typically,” Stephanie agreed mildly. Her husband looked intrigued.

“Would you have let me take you dancing, do you think?”

“I expect so.”

Her smile was soft, more amused than flirtatious. “I always say yes to you in the end.”

Bucky beamed like a child at Christmas.

 _“Will_ you let me take you dancing, then? In New York, where people do that?”

“I’ll think about it if you get some rest first. You’re still so tired, Yasha.”

He smiled at her entirely without guile.

“I blame you. A man gets worn out, falling in love again every time he turns his head.”

“Hush.”

Stephanie shoved at her husband, flustered and exasperated but also thoroughly charmed. “You’re ridiculous, you know that?”

Bucky kissed her shoulder, not at all sorry.

“You’re the one who married me.”

She smiled at him from inches away.

“What can I have been thinking?”

They were quiet for a moment- but Howard had never been especially good at that.

“When was that?”

Stephanie turned her head. She was still smiling, but the expression about her eyes was tense.

“After Bucharest,” she offered as her husband murmured that it would be nine months in a few days. Peggy looked deeply fond.

“What happened in Bucharest a few days less than nine months ago?”

It had hardly been a conscious choice- a colleague had mentioned, entirely offhand, that Lukin seemed less generally vicious now that his protégé’s recovery was assured. Anya had nodded, expression carefully neutral, and been rewarded for her nonchalance with the casual tidbit that Kolchak had somehow talked his way out of the hospital and was, apparently, recovering at home. The next thing she knew, it felt like, she was standing in his shoebox apartment, ragged curtains whipping at her back as he blinked at her from across the room.

“Anya?”

He looked so much younger out of uniform, and far too fragile with the harsh Moscow streetlights casting long shadows across his face. “What are you- did you climb up here?”

She hadn’t thought as far ahead as to have manufactured an excuse.

“He said- I mean- I wanted-”

But then he licked his poor chapped lips, and the lure of him was more than she could bear- suddenly she was kissing him fiercely, hands sliding up his cheeks and into his hair. It was longer than she’d ever seen it, because of course they hadn’t had time to worry about that while they’d been _saving his life_ , but somehow nothing had ever felt as utterly _right_ as burying her fingers in those dark waves as he yielded to her without question or hesitation. By the time she let go of him he looked a little dazed.

“I think I’ve had this dream.”

If any other man had said half as much she would have slapped him; instead, Anya realised with some chagrin that she her cheeks were flushing warm already. Still moving as if entranced, she stretched out a hand to trace the healing cut too close to his right eye. He would have been killed on impact, Lukin had said- should have, even, except that somehow he had known his only chance was to get clear before it ever came to that. For a moment, all she could see was the alternative- her vision was already blurring with horrified tears when he reached out to take her hand.

“Yasha, for god’s sake-”

He opened his arms when her voice wavered, enfolding her in an embrace that was warm and sure and totally without recrimination. “Thank God you’re home. Thank God you’re safe.”

He kissed her forehead, then caught her hand and pressed something cool and hard into her palm.

“I’ll feel better if you use the door, all right? You’re welcome any time you want to come in here and kiss me for no reason, I mean that.”

It was just like him, Anya knew with a certainty that couldn’t be supported by the scant four months she’d let him pursue her, to think first of her safety and only later about whether any part of what she’d done made sense at all.

“Ask me again,” she whispered before she’d realised she was going to say that.

It stung like a slap when he shook his head,  but his eyes were as gentle as the grip he still hand on her clenching hand.

“I never meant it as an ultimatum. You don’t have to change your mind for me, we can still-”

“I wouldn’t.”

She couldn’t help turning towards him, stealing her hand back so she could fling her arms around his neck. “I didn’t understand. I thought you didn’t- I mean- I don’t know what I thought.”  

She’d been so sharp with him, cool and dismissive because it had seemed easier than showing how desperately she wanted, against every instinct, to say yes even though it made no rational sense to even consider it.

“But then we heard-”

She didn’t know how much Lukin had told him. If he hadn’t had to see the recon shots she had, Anya decided, then she wasn’t going to be the one to tell him how they’d found him. She took a deep, shuddering breath and completed her confession with her lips a hair’s breadth from his neck. “We heard what happened, and when I could get away I went back to that church and promised on my knees that if he let me have you back I’d never let you go again.”

She didn’t tell him how she’d cried until she retched, sick with the knowledge that it would be her fault, and only hers, if it turned out she’d sent him to his death thinking there was anything on God’s earth she could love more than him.

“Unless that’s not what you want anymore.”

She realised abruptly that he, too, had had plenty of time to change his mind. “If you don’t-”

This time he kissed her first, soft and quelling. It was only slightly less familiar than breathing.

“Of course I still want to marry you. If that’s what you want, though, all right? Not because of-”

“It’s not. I promise it’s not.”

She claimed his lips again, not romantically but with the full force of three weeks’ terror and regret, and clung to him until they were as close as two breaths. “I’ve never wanted anything the way I want to be all yours.”

He shuddered in her arms, her name on his lips a rasping whisper half-choked with desire- but the look in his eyes spoke of the same shining devotion she was still learning to believe in.

“I love you,” she whispered, and realised with a start that it was the first time she’d admitted it out loud. He knew, though. He must. “I love you. Please, Yasha-”

He took her hands and held them carefully between them.

“Will you, then? Marry me, I mean. Let me love you, Anya Rozgova.”

She told him yes, softly and solemnly, and then kissed him breathless, more than once, until she was sure even he could have no choice but to believe her.

“Nine months, huh.”

Howard cleared his throat, alarmed to find himself very close to teary-eyed. He glanced at Peggy for support and felt immeasurably better at the sight of her mask of pure serenity. “You’re practically newlyweds.”

“Maybe.”

That was Bucky, calm but inquiring. “I keep wondering why you care so much.”

It wasn’t the same kind of accusation as when his wife had asked a similar question. Stephanie nudged his shoulder with her own.

“What are you thinking?”

He shook his head like he had water in his ears.

“It sounds insane.”

His wife reached up to kiss him swiftly on the lips.

“That’s often a risk, with you.”

The kid smiled at that, but when he met Howard’s eyes again it was with a kind of muted fear rather than anger in his eyes.

“Are we sleeper agents?”

They froze around him, the captain’s former team struck dumb by a leap of logic Howard didn’t think Erskine could fairly take credit for.

“Yasha-”

“She called you Stephanie in Vienna.”

He slipped an arm around his wife like he couldn’t help trying to shield her. “She was beside herself about the baby, and _he_ ’s more concerned with how we became lovers than with anything we’ve ever done for Lukin or the Kremlin.”

Before they could think of defending themselves he turned to face his wife, one careful hand tracing the curve of her jaw.

“Besides which I swear to God, sweet girl, sometimes I don’t even have to close my eyes to see you as a little kid with your hair in plaits and no immune system and a smile that never quit.”

He was breathing hard by the end of that confession, eyes wide as if he, too, had noticed abruptly that he’d slipped into a Brooklyn Irish lilt he could not have picked up in Kemerovo. This time, Peggy found her voice first.

“Captain-”

It wasn’t that he was ignoring her, Howard thought- the kid was focused entirely on his wife, whose eyes were brimming with tears as one of her hands clenched at his shoulder.

“There was a hospital.”

Her voice was hushed, as if she wasn’t sure she could believe herself. “They wouldn’t tell us anything for weeks.”

She dropped her eyes and her hand, so they were all watching in an uneasy silence as Stephanie took her husband’s left hand, very deliberately, in both of hers.

“Before they brought you home I dreamed about you, every night, on the same god-damned train in the mountains. I told you-”

“You told me to jump.”

He gave a taut, disbelieving chuckle. “I thought you’d lost your mind.”

“But you did it.”

“I did.”

She nodded, only once.

“I remember.”

Her husband raised the sharp grey eyes that had haunted Howard for two decades, and asked with one eyebrow and no words at all how the SSR expected them to make any sense of _that._


End file.
